Kings and Queens (Flawed)
by drummingsong
Summary: "She was never his, or anyone else's, she was without exception her own." - JP/LE one-shot


**Disclaimer:** I am not a published author (yet, or maybe never), so there you go. Not JK Rowling.

 **Rating: T** for just a little bit of explicit language.

Hello there,

I'm a new author here, although I've been a worshipper of some work published on the ff for a long, long time. Also, I'm not an English native-speaker, so please, forgive me any mistakes that I'm bound to make sometimes, although I'm trying not to.

This little piece came to me at night, after a movie marathon. The words in cursive are those taken from songs. First four lines come from **"Shake it out"** by the brilliant, the only **Florence & The Machine**, because a piece of my heart belongs to Flo forever and simply – because it converts my message behind this one-shot perfectly. Later, there is one line braided into the text, which is a modified verse from **"Mine" by T. Swift** (that originally goes "You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter"), because Taylor is the master (mistress?) of coming up with perfect catchy verses that get stuck in your head and then surprise you when you're writing Jily one-shots.

Okay, that's enough, before the introduction takes more space than the actual piece.

And hey, if you like this one, I'm working on a piece with more plot and more characters, do you want to read it?

Please, read and review!

Love,

Drummingsong

* * *

 _I can see no way, I can see no way  
And all of the ghouls come out to play  
And every demon wants his pound of flesh  
But I like to keep some things to myself_

* * *

She wasn't a breath-taking beauty. She was no Brigitte Bardot, no Audrey Hepburn either. She looked like a wisp of a birch-tree made of glass. He could break her with the fingers of his left hand. He could make crimson puddles of paint blossom across her white cheeks with one single touch.

She was no great beauty, but to him she was a queen wearing a crown inlaid with rubies.

There were bruises under the green lanterns of her eyes like two stubborn coffee stains. She seemed to never be fully rested as if she was sleeping with one eye open at night. Was she coming up with new ideas to prove her worth instead? Was she scared of dreaming red-blooded words of hatred whispered to her back?

"Do you want to help them out? Are you gonna dig your own grave and lay in waiting?"

She didn't looked up from her book, but her eyes didn't move anymore.

"Why do you care?"

The bee-hive residing in his stomach and lungs took a trip up his pipes to the throat, trying to escape with the answer that didn't want to find itself. He took a seat opposite her. In return, her knuckles turned near-translucent.

There was something buzzing in the silence, but these weren't the bees of his insides.

She stood up abruptly and started gathering her belongings with urgency bordering on desperation. He caught her wiry wrist when it seemed too late, whispering "Don't".

She sat down and they stayed like this, her tracing the grains of the wood with her wide-eyed gaze, him holding onto her paper wrist, quiet drums of her pulse reassuring him – she's not gone yet.

* * *

People were painting her perfect. In truth, she was the most beautifully flawed human being to ever grace his space, and that is saying something, considering he was the positive to the negative of every aching soul in the vicinity.

She was scared of getting hurt, and yet she loved too much and trusted too much until it sunk its crooked canines into her flesh and sucked the life out of her veins.

She was stubborn and opinionated to the bleeding of his eardrums, and the personification of passive-aggressive sarcasm.

She drowned her body weight in cups of black coffee with half-a-spoon of sugar and smoked cigarettes stolen from her father's secret stash, lighting them with her hand trembling, never inhaling too deep, like _a rebel made of a careless man's careful daughter_.

She didn't tolerate peppermint and the scent of vanilla to the brink of obsessive hatred.

Since she turned twelve, until the day she died, she had never cried.

When she was under the weather, she played her records of Led Zeppelin at full volume. When she was feeling pensive, it was David Bowie. When she was angry, around her head she wore a bubble of air buzzing with high-voltage lines wrapped around it.

She was sharp, chopping your poor ego with a quiet swish of her silver knife of ruthless words. Too bright for her own good. And she was challenging, the most challenging girl he's ever met. There were boys lining up to meet the challenge and failing miserably.

Sometimes, she was too clever, too honest with the world for it to handle it.

She was never his, or anyone else's, she was without exception her own.

* * *

"Do you love her?"

They were taking a bath in the last warm sunlight of the day, perched on the tiles of the castle, gaping with awe at the water table of the Black Lake gulping down the crimson ball of sun. It reminded him of the waves falling down her shoulders. They were sharing a self-made cigarette. They were feeling like some fallen idiot kings of the world.

"I do."

"I'm not surprised" Sirius said bitterly. "You made your life goal of patching up the fucked-up masochists like us."

He knew it was true. There were too many evidence to overturn the argument. But he was a fucked-up masochist himself.

"She's gonna chew you up and spit you out."

"Yeah." He couldn't wait.

* * *

One night he stumbled, pissed and cheerful, into the Heads' Commons and she was there, an island of autumn colours, blurry like a mirage, among the ocean of rubbish.

"What the…" he didn't manage to finish, because she raised her crowned head and blinded him with the light of green.

"I'm getting rid of things" she explained, her voice hushed, half-choked, the saddest thing he's ever heard, the most vulnerable he's ever seen her.

So he sat there next to her, reeking with cheap alcohol, completely and utterly intimidated by the feeling that something sacred was happening. There was a lot of rubbish collected with years and then there were the good things. There were rag puppet-dolls with buttons instead of eyes and stains on their ragged dresses. There were tons of books. There was a Jimi Hendrix record with an illegible dedication scribbled across the black-and-white unmoving photograph of his face, fading with age. There was a scarf of blacks and blues and purples smelling like warmth and fuchsia. There was a wooden cigarette-case with initials of "W.E." on its lid.

There were two boxes of "Goes" and "Stays" and they worked till the dawn flooded their bodies and their minds and she fell asleep across his chest, for once peaceful, right where she belonged.

Later that day, she took his hand with her own made of glass and never let go.

* * *

People painted them saints and heroes, but they were children scared of their own boldness, taking the role of martyrs with a shrug of a shoulder, because no one else wanted. They loved in rush and burned with loud hisses and they died with eyes wide open.

They were two kids in love and we've heard it all before. We love their story, and we think that there is such a thing as a glorious death. They knew that was a lie.


End file.
